I saw L'Adversaire last night (20 Aug 07), and I'm still trying to sort it out. It's very disturbing, possibly because it's based on a true story (an UNBELIEVABLY real and devastatingly true story; as the old saw has it, you couldn't make this stuff up).

Director Nicole Garcia has apparently decided to present the truth, more or less, as it happened. She has done a wonderful job with material written by her son, Frederic Belier-Garcia, and Emmanuel Carrere, upon whose novel the film is based. This must have been very difficult to transpose to the screen -- the subject matter requires a bombardment of raw, visceral emotions.

L'Adversaire is based on the sensational 1993 French murder case involving Jean-Claude Romand, who murdered his wife, two children and his parents before attempting suicide himself. After almost two decades of blatant deceit (not a mere 15 years as shown in the film), he was about to bring shame on everyone, most of all upon himself. Rather than face the inevitable, he commits the atrocities.

Romand was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1996.

Everyone close to him believes that the cinematic Romand -- Jean-Marc Faure (Daniel Auteuil) -- is a medical doctor at the World Health Organization (a UN agency) in Geneva. He doesn't work there at all -- he isn't even a doctor. He hangs around the WHO halls, briefcase in hand, a haunted, sad, lonely man; he pops in on occasional conferences; he sleeps, listens to his car radio, giggles, reads newspapers, eats, and then, after his 'full day,' he goes home to his wife and two children. He carries on this fiction for 15 long years, financing it on 'donations' from family and friends who believe Faure is investing their money for handsome returns.

The days of reckoning come, as they must, and Faure begins to implode. What follows is a minimalist excursion into terror, but with an important caveat: there's very little blood. The viewer fills in the killing scenes, which, as Hitchcock knew so well, is always more frightening.

Daniel Auteuil as Faure is perfect. This is a difficult performance -- how does the viewer empathize with such an ostensible monster? And yet we do, based on Auteuil's performance. He emerges as a pathetic, tortured man who adopts his elaborate NON-lifestyle early, as a 'stop-gap' perhaps. But the years zip by and he finds himself in so deeply that he cannot extricate himself. After seeing Auteuil's magnificent Gallic face twist and turn into 100 degrees of irony, desperation, joy, and pain, you're left to conclude that no other French actor alive could play this part, unless it would be Aurelien Recoing. He superbly played a stunning similar role (without the murders) in L'Emploi du temps (Time Out), which was released in 2001, a year before L'Adversaire.

The lovely Geraldine Pailhas as Faure's bewildered and long-suffering wife doesn't have very much to do, but she brings shining femininity to her part. Emmanuelle Devos is, as usual, outstanding as Faure's flighty girlfriend.

The film has a few problems: there's a bumpy, fuzzy beginning, and the flashbacks are disruptive and often confusing. Auteuil was 52 years old when he made the film, too old for a man who left medical school (a drop-out) only 15 years before. And we're left with a big question at the end: did he live or die? If you didn't know the real story of Jean-Claude Romand, that lingers as a loose end with the viewer.

Despite these deficiencies, it really doesn't matter. This is just a very disturbing REAL story -- Sartrean nothingness, existentialism brought to life -- the 'non-person,' the artificial human being who lives a titanic lie for a very long time and gets away with it. No one really seems to notice, which tells us a lot about our own sense of self-absorption.

This film is very dark, but it couldn't be anything else. We are looking into the face of hell, an assault of demons, through the eyes of Auteuil. L'Adversaire is a splendid exploration of that part of all of us that is afflicted by deviant behaviour. We all deceive, we all lie; it's just a matter of how far we are willing to take it.